Super-resolution techniques generate high-resolution (HR) images from one or more low-resolution (LR) images. With the improvement in the resolution of image capture technology, even though there are capture and display devices that can produce high-resolution images and videos, there are many existing low-resolution images and videos that can be found in surveillance videos, mobile devices, and broadcast content. In order to improve the user experience while watching such content on higher resolution display devices, such as high definition display device, 4K display device, or 8K display device, the input video should be increased in resolution to match that of the display. Accordingly, often the super-resolution technique predicts thousands of unknown pixel values from a small fraction of input pixels. This is inherently an ill-posed problem and the ambiguity increases as the scaling factor increases. The amount of information that is “missing” in a low resolution image relative to the target high resolution image is very large, in terms of fine detail and high frequency information that contributes to the perception of a high quality rendered image on a high resolution display. Existing techniques have a limited ability to restore and enhance fine image detail. It is desirable to reconstruct and enhance image detail with a high quality result even at increased upscaling factors. Existing techniques for super-resolution image and video upscaling often require very high computational cost. Some techniques combine images of a scene or multiple frames of a video to enhance resolution, which may incur high memory or data transfer costs. Some techniques utilize iterative optimization approaches to enhance resolution, which may incur high computational cost. It is also desirable to perform super-resolution image generation at a limited computational cost. It is desirable for a super resolution image enhancement system that uses a single low resolution input image to generate a high resolution output image.
The foregoing and other objectives, features, and advantages of the invention may be more readily understood upon consideration of the following detailed description of the invention, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.